


Twist and Shout

by princessofmind



Category: Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Marching Band
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-06
Updated: 2015-01-27
Packaged: 2018-03-06 09:54:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3130271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/princessofmind/pseuds/princessofmind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marching band: a place for nerds of all kinds to congregate, stumble around on a football field, and play music.  How much shit can really go down?  Wirt finds himself missing the simpler times of freshman year when he catches the attention of new student Beatrice, and when it rains, it pours.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Band camp sucks.

It’s one of the few constants in the universe, like the sky being blue and the grass being green, thus shall band camp always suck. You’re not a particularly athletic person to begin with, but after caving in to the incessant badgering of your stepfather and little brother, you’d found that you actually kind of like it despite how physically demanding it can be.

Which it really is!

Camp is two weeks long, leading up to the first day of school, for twelve hours come rain or shine. And it’s usually shine, with the sun baking down on the field that at one point held grass, but has been trampled by so many high schoolers that it’s nothing more than pitiful, dry stalks and hard, dusty ground. There’s no shade save for a couple of trees off near the director’s tower, and the seniors kind of have dibs on those for water breaks.

So you’re utterly miserable, sipping from your styrofoam cup instead of chugging it (and puking, like you did last year), sweat stinging your eyes and sticking your hair to your forehead as you squint across the field. Sara is talking to her section leader, trumpet in one hand and her water bottle in the other, but she breaks away when she spots you slumped morosely at the edge of the field.

“Hey!” she greets, and if you didn’t know that she spent her childhood in _Texas_ of all places, you’d curse her as a witch for being so unfazed by the heat. “Looking good as always! Lemme guess, you didn’t do any prep work for this season.”

She’s also certifiably insane, jogging through her neighborhood and doing push-ups on the back porch in preparation for camp, which explains why she has muscle and you just look like a gross, overcooked noodle. “Why would I subject myself to more torture than is absolutely necessary?”

Rolling her eyes, she sits down cross-legged next to you, toying with the strap on her water bottle. “At least your section leader is humane this year. We’ve already had to run laps twice, and she’s a real stickler this year for making us to push-ups whenever we miss our dots.”

“I would actually die. And then drop out,” you say, draining the rest of your water and squinting unhappily in the direction of your clarinet, which seems to have migrated further away from you than you’d thought.

Which is when someone trips over it.

Squawking in indignation, you grab for the instrument and completely disregard the person who just did an impressive stumble-near-somersault to avoid falling flat on their face, because your instrument is far more important than any puny human. Said human is a girl, someone you’ve never seen before (which is a feat, since despite being so highly ranked, your band is small), and she whips around to glower at you with a force about ten thousand times more than the rays of the sun currently cooking you to a crisp.

“Don’t just leave your instrument laying around like that,” she scolds, one of her hands on her hip and the other holding a styrofoam cup just like your own. She’s a red head, which probably explains why her cheeks are already freckled and sunburnt on the first day, but her eyes are an intense emerald green that kind of makes you stammer on any smart retort you could have.

When it becomes obvious that you can’t stop choking on your own tongue long enough to retort, she sighs in disgust and continues on her way to the field, tossing her cup in one of the trash cans before picking up a practice flag.

Guard, then.

“Why are all guard members such bitches?” Sara asks, and you just flop down onto the dry ground and wish for death for the thousandth time that day.

As it turns out, the redhead is Beatrice, a new student whose parents just moved from the country, and she’s a junior to your sophomore. At her old school, color guard auditions started in eighth grade, so she’s actually got as much experience as the seniors (which they all hate, naturally), and it shows. You have yet to see her drop a flag, and when rifle line auditions roll around at the end of the first week, she gets the solo without so much as a flicker of nerves on her face.

The two of you have a lot of sets next to one another, so while the guard is off practicing on their own most of the time, you see her picking distractedly at her cuticles or pulling her phone out of the waistband of her shorts to tap out quick messages while the director is screaming at the trumpets to “please, God, make a straight line”. You don’t really talk, since it’s kind of frowned upon (read: forbidden) to talk during critique, but you do catch her making faces at you sometimes, which you naturally return.

And on the first day of the second week, she plops down with you and Sara, an insulated water bottle in her hand and a smear of sunscreen across her nose. “I heard you fell asleep in sectionals yesterday,” she says, and you wish for death yet again.

“How have you even heard about that?” you whine. “You’re not even in the band.”

Sara and Beatrice share a smirk. “It’s a small band,” Sara points out helpfully. “Your section is only like, twelve people, so of course it’s noticeable when you doze off.”

You have night terrors sometimes, and you’ve been lucky enough to not have any of them coincide with band practice, but your luck was bound to run out eventually (like it always does). So you’d barely slept, on top of three hours of practice in the hundred degree heat, which meant sitting on the floor in the hallway outside the science classrooms was the perfect time to take a nap. Naturally.

“I just want to know how you fell asleep while you were playing,” Beatrice says.

“I wasn’t playing,” you grumbled into your cup. “Section B kept fudging their runs, so our section leader was making them go through it over and over again. I’m Section A, so I didn’t have anything else to do.”

“Which meant you leaned back against the lockers and passed out,” Sara supplied helpfully, and Beatrice cackles like something out of a Halloween special.

“I’m genuinely impressed,” she says. “If this was my old school, you’d be running laps for months.”

If water wasn’t such a precious commodity, you’d dump it all over her head, so instead you just settle for twisting around so your back is to them for the rest of the break. They talk about music and movies, and while you’d like to chime in, if there’s one thing you are, it’s incredibly stubborn.

Beatrice joins the two of you every water break after that, and the three of you walk to Subway every day for lunch just ten minutes down the street from the practice field. You’re usually not brave enough to eat sweets on band practice days, but she breaks off a corner of her double chocolate chip cookie (just the perfect amount for a mouthful), and in exchange you let her have a couple of your Doritos (since she likes them, but not enough for a whole bag).

Things get easier, by the second week. You’re sleep deprived and exhausted, but your body is starting to remember how to function under such grueling circumstances, and you wish for death a little less often. Sara and the rest of her section still get screamed at the most, you still narrowly avoid knocking into the drum line, and Beatrice makes a name for herself as being scarily unavoidable (she almost knocks a freshman unconscious when they get their dot wrong and tries to pass too close to her). It’s almost enjoyable, and just like last year, you find yourself dreading the practice performance and the start of school.

Everyone always feels like a huge dork for the practice performance, because it’s too hot to wear uniforms, so you wear show shirts with khakis so everyone at least looks the same. At least the shirt isn’t white this year; it’s navy blue with white for the design, and it’s actually kind of a neat concept this year. Your show is called “Over the Garden Wall”, and features lots of suspenseful, creepy, ethereal music, so the title of the show on the front of your shirts is covered in ivy and leaves, like it’s been overgrown with foliage.

For once, everyone isn’t a gross, sweaty mess, and you’re all sitting around in the band room eating pizza before warmups start. Sara already found you, but the guard is having a meeting, so Beatrice shows up later. Her curly hair seems to have been tamed into a neater bun than usual, and she’s wearing a thick white ribbon around it like the rest of the guard, and her khaki shorts are quite….quite short, to match all the others (because the guard kind of has a reputation, and one dissenting voice doesn’t modesty make).

She has really, really nice legs.

And she’s also looking at you like you’ve grown another head, so you must be staring. You let her steal all the pepperoni off your pizza in apology.

That night, with the sky painted shades of red and purple, you have your first full, complete run of the show with parents and bored siblings sitting in the stands. Miraculously, you don’t stumble, and Sara somehow keeps the trumpets from careening off into the end zone. Beatrice twirls and spins and throws her rifle, turning a backflip with one hand before catching it perfectly, much to the delight of the audience, and it makes you proud to hear the slap of wood and metal against her palms with each perfect catch.

A few curls have worked loose of her bun by the end, and Sara gets a congratulatory hug from her (since you’ve all been wincing in sympathy all camp every time her section gets railed out in front of the whole band), which for some reason makes you disappointed with the gleeful high five you get instead.

Why would you want a hug, anyways? You’re gross and sweaty and the last thing you need is a girl getting up in your personal space.

This is stupid. You’re stupid.

At least things can’t get any worse. She’s a junior, you’re a sophomore, so you’ll barely see each other once school starts, right? Right?


	2. Chapter 2

Of course, as soon as you think that you’re home free for the duration of the school year, your councilor calls you in during homeroom to tell you that a spot opened up in the Lettering and Design class, and your name was next on the waiting list. This isn’t quite the kind of art you’re good at, since you’re more of a writer than anything, but this class taught _calligraphy_ and illuminated lettering, which you certainly wouldn’t mind including in the ever-growing collection of notebooks full of poetry.

Naturally, you accept.

Naturally, it’s the only class you’re in that isn’t grade-specific.

Naturally, you walk in on the first day and see Beatrice sitting at one of the corner tables, tapping the eraser of her pencil against her stack of textbooks as she surveys the classroom like a suspicious animal.

_Naturally_ , she sees you, and her face is awash with relief at not being alone in this class, so you resign yourself utterly to your fate and make your way over.

She looks different, when she’s not dressed for camp. For one thing, she’s wearing a dress, with tights and a light cardigan over it. She mentioned in passing that her parents were pretty old-fashioned, and the only reason she didn’t have to wear dresses to camp was because the guard captain literally forbade her from joining the team if she did. It’s kind of weird, because she’s not especially feminine, and you’d always expected her to be slumping around in worn-soft jeans and a hoodie over something like this.

But she looks nice too, her hair pulled up in a messy bun with a pen stuck through it to try and keep the curls in place, but when you open your mouth to say so, she just holds up a hand for silence.

“Don’t. Just save it,” she says, tugging at the hem of her dress and grimacing. “If one more person makes a snide comment about how I look like a proper young country girl, I’ll punch them in the face.”

“Please don’t get suspended your first day,” you say, slinging your backpack over the back of your chair and fishing out your binder designated for this class. “I….I _was_ going to say that your dress is a nice color, but.”

Great. Your voice, which still hasn’t finished changing, squeaks somewhere in the middle of the sentence, which makes her smirk in clear amusement. “So uh, how’s your first day going? What all do you have?”

Flipping to a clean sheet of lined paper, you take a pencil from the compartment in your bag and scrawl the date on the top. “Um, I have this, algebra, chemistry, honors english, and band. What about you?”

“AP English, AP American history, gym, and this.”

You kind of squint at her, because Beatrice never really struck you as the AP kind of girl. The classes are notoriously hard, and for all that they provide college credit on top of fulfilling graduation requirements, it’s usually too much to put on top of a full rehearsal schedule. Of course, subtlety has never been your strong point, and she wallops you in the shoulder for the obvious incredulity in your eyes.

“Look, when you live out on a farm in the middle of nowhere, you have a lot of free time. We didn’t get cable, or have internet, and I didn’t get my cellphone until we moved here.”

“Is your family like, Amish or something?”

That probably should have gotten you hit again, but she just sighs and pushes her hair out of her eyes from where it’s fallen from her bun. “Not really. We just lived too far out of the way to get any of that stuff, you know? I could have had a cell phone, but it wouldn’t have gotten reception. We were too far off the grid to get television or internet cables laid down, so.” A shrug. “I didn’t really know anything else, so it didn’t bother me.”

Her school had been tiny, hence why the color guard started accepting try-outs in eighth grade. So it stood to reason that if the whole school was made up of farmers and country kids, most of them would be a lot like her.

“I want to go shopping for some regular clothes this weekend,” she said, her pencil sketching dark, sweeping lines across the paper in front of her. “My parents aren’t trying to be mean, I don’t think. They just don’t realize how badly I stick out here.” There are smudges on the side of her hand, from where she’s dragging it through the lead, but it doesn’t seem to bother her. “How’s the mall around here?”

You shrug, because that’s really not something you give a lot of thought to. Most of your clothes come from Good Will, since the thought of spending more than ten dollars on any clothing item makes you feel ill, and you kind of like dressing a bit old fashioned yourself. Why pretend like you’re anything but the weird nerd kid that you apparently are?

“Thanks, that was helpful,” she says, and it takes you a moment to realize that the lines and shadows taking form under her fingertips _are your face_. Like you said, you aren’t _this_ kind of artist, so it makes your cheeks flush bright red as you duck your face. “Hey, I’m not done. You were doing such a good job of staying still, I didn’t even have to say anything.”

You scowl, and you wonder what, exactly, you were expecting from her. When you first met her, you thought she would fit in nicely with the rest of the guard, prissy and bossy and mean. But by the end of camp, she was just Beatrice, who made faces and was incredibly talented at tossing flags and rifles and was probably in the best shape of all the girls on the squad. So maybe she was an athlete, competing in cross country and basketball or maybe even softball, coming to school in track pants and t-shirts with various team logos emblazoned on the front.

But instead, she’s sitting in your art class, wearing a blue paisley dress and sketching you, her backpack full of advanced placement textbooks and her hair falling in her face as her hand flies across the paper in front of her. You can’t watch, so instead you look at the rest of the kids filing into the classroom and trying not to notice how she catches her bottom lip between her teeth, eyes flicking up to study you before turning back to the drawing. There was always something so interesting to you about people who could draw, who could take what they were looking at and commit it to the paper in front of you, but you hadn’t given much thought to what it would be like to be one of their subjects.

“There,” she says, rubbing the grey that stains the side of her hand with her fingers and trying to get it to at least not look as bad. “You have an interesting face.”

“That doesn’t sound even close to a compliment!” you sputter, because it wasn’t a _nice_ face, it was an interesting face.

“When you draw, it’s better to be interesting,” she says seriously, taking what looks like a sketchbook out of her bag and stuffing the lined paper into it, and now she looks…a bit embarrassed too. “Sorry, that was probably rude of me. I’ve just not had the free time to draw a damn thing since camp started.”

“It’s fine,” you grumble, rubbing your forehead and trying not to wonder why you look so much more attractive in her sketch than you do in the mirror.


End file.
